How to control Winamp from your iPhone, iPod Touch or web browser

by Ross McKillop on May 5, 2008

This tutorial will guide you through setting up and using WWWinamp, a Windows web server-like application that allows remote control of Winamp via any web browser. If you run a media server in your house and want to be able to control what’s playing in Winamp without having to go to that server, this is the program for you.

To get started, download and install WWWinamp. It might go without saying, but I’ll do it anyway, you will of course need to have Winamp installed as well. The installation of WWWinamp is very straight forward – you’ll mostly click “next” a bunch of times.

Once the install has finished, you’ll need to edit the config file. To do so, click Start -> All Programs -> WWWinamp -> WWWinamp Configuration.

Scroll down to the port: section of the file. Select a port to use to run WWWinamp on. The default is 80, but I prefer to use 8090. Whatever you choose, make sure it isn’t one that conflicts with another program running on your PC.

In the AccessLoginPassword: section you can specify a user name and password so that only you can access WWWinamp. If you’re only going to control Winamp from a device in your house (and your PC is connected to a router), you can skip using a user/pass entirely. This tutorial assumes that your PC is behind a router. If you do want to password protect access to WWWinamp, use the format:

Similar to the previous step, you can set a user name and password to the admin section of WWWinamp. And again, if you’re behind a router and don’t plan on accessing Winamp from outside of your own network, you can skip adding a user/pass. If you do want to password protect the admin section, use the format:

Now scroll down to the DBPath section. It’s here that you’ll tell WWWinamp where your audio files are stored. Use a semicolon to separate different folders. For example, I keep my music two folders – C:\mp3 and the “My Music” folder, which is C:\Documents and Settings\my-user-name-\My Documents\My Music\. So my DPPath looks like this:

Test out WWWinamp by entering http://localhost:port in a web browser on the same PC that WWWinamp is running on. Remember, the port you’ll enter is the one you specified back in step 3. If you opted to specify a user name and password, you’ll need to enter them here.

You should be presented with a window similar to the one below. Click on Show all to display your MP3s.

To access WWWinamp from your iPhone, iPod Touch or other Internet connected device, enter the IP address of the PC running WWWinamp (don’t forget :port) in its web browser. Now you can control Winamp remotely.